Cafe-goers stay at home – ‘Customers dwindling’
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KUWAIT CITY, Feb 27: With the increasing talk about the dangers of the Corona virus (COVID19) and considering the high number of infected cases in Kuwait, many café goers in the past few days prefer to stay at home for fear of coming into contact with people carrying the virus, reports Al-Rai daily.
A quick tour of several café joints in Farwaniya, Hawalli and Khaitan areas revealed a noticeable decline in the number of customers, which are usually crowded at the weekends and official holidays.
It is always difficult to find an empty place, especially if the holiday coincides with a football match between the top Spanish or Egyptian teams, or a match involving the popular Liverpool team in support of Egyptian star Mohammad Salah.
One of the workers at Al-Ruwwad Café in Khaitan, Walid Tawfiq, attributed the decrease in number of visitors to the cafe to the fear of many of them of contracting the novel Coronavirus, expecting their numbers to decrease further in the coming days.
Asked why he was present at the café and not afraid of getting infected with the virus, a customer named Ismat Tahsin said “we will only suffer from what God has written for us.
The cafe is for me and my friends whom I sit with daily.” On the reason why he was sitting alone, he said “I waited for my friends whom I sit with every day to play dominoes, but nobody turned up for their fear of injury.” The state of cafes in Farwaniya area was very similar to cafes in Khaitan, as the number of customers decreased by almost half.
A worker in one of the cafes, Atef Ramadan said, “Tables in this place I work and the adjacent cafe used to be fully booked one hour before the discovery of cases of corona infection. Ramadan added, “However, as you see today, numbers are few and we expect it to decrease even more with the discovery of larger cases”. Most of the customers who smoke hookahs now prefer to order (Ahwaz) medical protection for themselves, as they believe the infection is only transmitted through the regular Ahwaz.”
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